K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

The short stack

I’ve been stacking up test systems these days, in anticipation of the Mebius finishing with its “stress test” of the CF card. It’s still running, believe it or not, with no errors or problems to report.

Half of these don’t have a snowball’s chance in Helechawa of actually running at 150Mhz on 32Mb, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

On top of that, I don’t expect the remaining half to know what to do with that Trident video card, the one that is trapped at VESA1.2, and needs a particular sort of coaxing to actually work.

Most of these are installed via Qemu, but a couple I actually booted into a live environment, then installed to USB disk and copied to a file with dd. In any case, this is the short stack, if I can call it that. In no particular order …

There’s INX (http://inx.maincontent.net/) if you want to try out a text based version of Ubuntu, but it’s not the latest version. I keep seeing a lot of recommendations for Tiny Core Linux, but I haven’t tried it myself because it says some hardware not completely supported. I keep wondering how FreeBSD stacks up against the various versions of Linux on lower resource systems. I’d love to see some statistics and comparisons. I found video playback faster on FreeBSD, but I was comparing programs that run using X Windows. Maybe a framebuffer solution for playing videos would be faster on Linux and FreeBSD doesn’t appear to have good support for the framebuffer. I’ve also been experimenting with FreeBSD’s Linux emulation layer. You can take programs built for a Linux machine such as Debian and if you copy all supporting libraries over some of them will run on FreeBSD as well. Might make a good solution for sharing compiled software across different machines.

Look forward to hearing the results of your investigations. I’m currently debating on whether to try another Linux distribution on my own laptop or leave FreeBSD on it. Will be interested to see what operating systems/distributions still work in 32 MB RAM.